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Warriors release rendering of what new SF arena will look like from orbit

People love the arena renderings, even if the actual buildings seldom end up looking quite like the original drawings, so here you go. Courtesy of the San Francisco Business Times, renderings of the latest Golden State Warriors arena plans:

Toilet bowl? Trash can lid? The Piazza del Campo in Siena, Italy? (Snohetta designer Craig Dykers actually compared the design to one of these three — see if you can guess which!)

Okay, this doesn’t actually show us much of anything of what the arena will look like to humans who aren’t paragliding overhead. (Snohetta didn’t release any ground-level renderings.) You can see where two 160-foot office towers would go (only a bit taller than the arena itself), but other than that, for now you’ll just have to imagine yourself being one of those teensy dots looking up at the building.

At least the Warriors are financing this pretty much out of the teams pocket. Mark Davis has to feel like an idiot for not getting in on the Levi’s Stadium deal when he could of, now he’s looking at his team playing in the Rose Bowl or Alamodome.

This looks like it was designed by someone who has only ever worked on suburban arenas, they even said “The basic idea is to avoid building out to the property line”, your building in an urban area act like it. It is set hundreds of feet back from the mass transit line, there can be no doubt there are frontage requirements they seem unhappy constrained their architectural freedom from doing more and they can hope it to be like a grand plaza but it is designed more like 60s/70s era corporate plazas that most often failed wastes of space.

Considering San Francisco is still the only major city where I’ve seen multiple people simply squatting down and taking a dump on the sidewalk even if it does look like a toilet bowl it’s is strangely appropriate.